Until yesterday, I never heard about the "No Jews in Kentucky" etc. order, either.

Josef Lada may very well be the most widely popular Czech artist. He also helped immortalize the Good Soldier Schweik, as @res knows.

As one art critic once said, the paintings of Josef Lada accompany Czechs from cradle to grave. He is as well known for his illustrations of fairy tales and children’s readers as he is for his landscapes, which each Christmas are printed thousands of times over on the front of the nation’s Christmas cards. Lada was also the artist who gave the grinning, rotund Good Soldier Švejk his form.

It was excessive in scope of course, not artfully drafred at all. It was aimed at black market cotton traders who Grant perceived to be Jewish, of course the verbatim order would've ethnically cleansed his military department, but in a certain sense was directed at traders coming south (the first carpet baggers)

Thanks for the link to Lada's life and art. I really like his stuff. It's another window into Czech culture.

Havel seems to be a big part of Czech culture, also. I think I remember that you actually say you saw him, in person, just before he died.

Thank you, that's very sweet of you to remember that. Yes, I did see him from up close (the closeness was sort of unexpected, he passed me in a narrow hallway) at a conference two months before his death, and I was shocked by how horribly ill he looked. He was never a big guy, but he turned impossibly fragile during those last months, and his face was SO haggard it was scary. He seemed to be in a great mood, though. And based on what I've heard and read, his death was actually a very peaceful one, and mentally he remained in top form till the very last moments.

There were numerous gatherings, conferences and other events to commemorate the anniversary of his death, not just here but also in Poland, Italy, Brussels and possibly elsewhere. This however was probably the most unique initiative:

But just so I don't turn this into a Czech nationalist thread, today is also the day when Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" went on sale (1843) and the day the last Rolls Royce Silver Ghost was sold in London (1927).

Thank you, that's very sweet of you to remember that. Yes, I did see him from up close (the closeness was sort of unexpected, he passed me in a narrow hallway) at a conference two months before his death, and I was shocked by how horribly ill he looked. He was never a big guy, but he turned impossibly fragile during those last months, and his face was SO haggard it was scary. He seemed to be in a great mood, though. And based on what I've heard and read, his death was actually a very peaceful one, and mentally he remained in top form till the very last moments.

There were numerous gatherings, conferences and other events to commemorate the anniversary of his death, not just here but also in Poland, Italy, Brussels and possibly elsewhere. This however was probably the most unique initiative:

But just so I don't turn this into a Czech nationalist thread, today is also the day when Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" went on sale (1843) and the day the last Rolls Royce Silver Ghost was sold in London (1927).

Lol. That's a cute story about his pants. Not the part about his being in prison, of course.

Karel Čapek introduced and made popular the frequently used international word robot, which first appeared in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) in 1920. While it is frequently thought that he was the originator of the word, he wrote a short letter in reference to an article in the Oxford English Dictionary etymology in which he named his brother, painter and writer Josef Čapek, as its actual inventor.[7] In an article in the Czech journal Lidové noviny in 1933, he also explained that he had originally wanted to call the creatures laboři (from Latin labor, work). However, he did not like the word, seeing it as too artificial, and sought advice from his brother Josef, who suggested "roboti" (robots in English).

That's far from his only or biggest contribution, though. He's one of the very few Czech writers I love, and I highly recommend "War With The Newts" at least.

War with the Newts (Válka s mloky in the original Czech), also translated as War with the Salamanders, is a 1936 satirical science fiction novel by Czech author Karel Čapek. It concerns the discovery in the Pacific of a sea-dwelling race, an intelligent breed of newts, who are initially enslaved and exploited. They acquire human knowledge and rebel, leading to a global war for supremacy.